» Bootsplash и gensplash

Bootsplash is a kernel patch designed and written by a group of SuSE developers for use in their distribution. It provides graphical backgrounds on virtual consoles and the so-called "silent mode" in which it's possible to display a progress bar instead of all the messages printed by initscripts.

Bootsplash quickly got popular enough to be used in many other Linux distros, including Gentoo. Bootsplash is also a package of a few userspace utilities (fbresolution, fbmngplay, fbtruetype) which are often used to make the silent splash look nicer (eg. fbtruetype is used to display a message such as "Booting the system"). You can read all about bootsplash on its site http://www.bootsplash.org/. There is also a very nice unofficial site at http://www.bootsplash.de/.

Gensplash is a project started by me. It's general aim is creating a set of tools which could "enrich" the Gentoo boot process (displaying messages, animations, progress bars, etc). It has been divided into two stages. The first stage consists of developing fbsplash and splashutils. The second stage is about developing the new program (or a set of programs) that will be reponsible for displaying all the nice and fancy things during boot-up/shutdown/reboot.

Fbsplash is kernel patch developed as a part of the gensplash project. It creates an interface between the kernel and userspace, which different programs can use to switch the system between the silent and verbose modes, and to set graphical backgrounds on consoles.

Splashutils is a package consisting of a few userspace programs, the most important of them being the 'splash_helper', which answers all requests from the kernel. Splashutils and fbsplash, when installed and properly configured, provide all the features of bootsplash.